Catholic prayers by situation
When someone you love is in a hard moment, the question is not usually whether to pray. It is what to pray. Each page below collects the prayers Catholic tradition has given us for one specific situation, with a way to gather others and pray together if you want to.
Catholic prayers for a friend with cancer
When someone you love has been diagnosed with cancer, the days that follow can feel like there is nothing you can do. Prayer is one of the things you can do. The prayers below are some of the ones the Church has given us for moments like this. None of them are a guarantee of healing. All of them are a way of standing with the person you love, in front of God, every day they are walking through this.
Catholic prayers for a sick child
Watching a child suffer is one of the heaviest things a parent or godparent or grandparent can carry. The prayers below are not a way to bargain with God for an outcome. They are a way to stand alongside the parents, holding the child in front of the Father who held His own Son through the cross. Pray any of them. Pray all of them. Pray badly. Just keep showing up.
Catholic prayers before surgery
The hours before a surgery are quiet hours. There is paperwork, fasting, the slow walk to pre-op. The prayers below are short enough to pray in those hours, and steady enough to carry the family in the waiting room while the surgery happens. None of them replace medicine. All of them put the medicine in the hands of the One who gave the surgeon the skill to use it.
Catholic prayers for a grieving family
Grief outlasts the funeral. The casseroles stop arriving, the visits taper, and the family is left in a house that still has the absent person's coat on the hook. The prayers below are for that long stretch, the months when most people have moved on but the family has not. Catholic tradition makes room for this. We pray for the dead. We pray for the bereaved. We do both for a long time.
Catholic prayers for someone struggling with addiction
Praying for someone in active addiction is one of the longest forms of prayer there is. There is no clear nine-day arc. There is no clear answer about whether they will be free. There is just the daily showing up, often in private, often without any visible result, often for years. Catholic tradition has language for this. St. Monica prayed for her son Augustine for seventeen years. He became a saint. She did not know that was coming.
Catholic prayers for couples trying to conceive
Catholic teaching on family and fertility is rich, and Catholic teaching on the suffering of couples who want children and cannot have them is also rich. The prayers below are for the second part. They are not a Catholic version of pray harder. They are the prayers Catholic couples have prayed for centuries through years of waiting, and through the question of whether the waiting has an end.
Don't see your situation?
Start a PrayerTrain anyway. The prayer library covers many more situations than the cluster here, and the create flow will recommend prayers based on the situation you describe.